How To Get the Most Out of Your Massage

I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think.
- Moshe Feldenkrais-

Massage is a wonderful practice that can provide so much for us in our fast paced, modern lives. For starters; it can help alleviate pain, calm our anxieties, lift our spirits, and provide a space for us to connect more wholly with our bodies. Deeper than that though, massage can be viewed as a practice which connects us to our higher aspirations and intuitions. In order for it become that though, it takes a reframing of what’s possible and an expansion of our perspectives. That’s where I hope this article can be of service to you. To begin this journey, it helps to learn how we can make the most out of our time with the practice of massage therapy.

So whether you’re coming to massage for a solution to that kink in your neck, a reset from your busy schedule, or some insight from your body’s deep intelligence - this list will help you interface with massage in a way that you’ll receive the maximum amount of benefit from what it has to offer.

Pre-Massage

Show Up Ten Minutes Prior to Your Session Time
The first thing I would recommend to just about anyone showing up for massage is to not only arrive up on time, but to be early! This allows us a chance to settle in, talk about your issues, and make a treatment plan without sacrificing any of your hands on table time. Due to the back to back nature of my schedule, I often don’t have the flexibility to extend sessions beyond their official end-time. As much as I would love to ensure the full 60,90, or 120 minutes that someone is paying for to be allocated to the time spent on the table, there naturally is going to be some minutes shaved off in the introductions and brief exploration of what the day’s session will look like.

Having this extra ten minutes (or fifteen if you’re on the punctual side) gives us a chance to really connect on what you’re looking for from your session. This time typically shortens as we deepen our therapeutic relationship but is still very crucial for the first few sessions.

I’d also recommend signing up for a ‘clean language’ session which is found underneath my add-ons when you book your appointment. This makes a great addition and adds an extra half hour to our time together. Clean Language is a conversational technique that allows the recipient a space to have a dialogue between their mind and body. It’s very immediate and powerful, adding a great deal of depth to the bodywork session.

Get Educated
One of the core pillars of my practice is the importance of client pain literacy. Since a majority of people who seek out massage are in some sort of pain, it’s very helpful to ask the question, ‘what’s happening in my body when I hurt?’ Well the answer is far more surprising and mysterious than we generally give it credit for. I’ll keep this section short since I’ve covered this topic in great detail for other blog posts (Found by clicking the image below) but to summarize - pain has less to do with physical injury than it does with sensitivity within the nervous system. This means that the most common aches, tension, and even acute pains are not 1:1 representations of the state of our tissues.

While this certainly doesn’t mean that your pain isn’t real or that injury doesn’t exist - it does mean that our approach to providing you relief could have less to do with invasive techniques and manipulations; and more to do with relaxing the overly sensitive nervous system. It’s estimated that this problem of sensitization accounts for far more musculoskeletal pains than we would have originally anticipated. The more familiar we become with the last 20+ years of research in this field, the broader our interventions can become, taking into account other factors that aren’t mechanical such as; stress levels, sleep, diet, amount of dynamic movements, and mindset.

The last benefit I’ll mention here is that this education can also help us frame our pain in a way that reduces our stress about it. This pain of being in pain exacerbates the noxious sensations we experience and can trap us in a hard to escape loop of increasing sensitivity. By learning it’s true nature, we can settle into the experience without fear of there being something injured or fundamentally broken about us. It also paints an optimistic future in that we can change the way our nervous system fires over time and cure our pain from the ground up.

This educational process is one we can take together as we couple the manual therapy with a drip feed of information and perspectives from experts around the world. There is a degree of effort and interest required to take this step and many people may not want to take the leap - but for those of you that do, I’m confident it can dramatically change your relationship to pain.

Temper Your Expectations
As discussed above, pain is exacerbated by stress and anxiety. Since pain is inherently unsettling, this makes the prospect of finding relief extra challenging. While it may be difficult, it’s not impossible. Understanding the subtleties of how our anxiety expresses itself can help us mitigate and limit our time feeding into it. One of the most common instances that I see with my clients is the desire for a quick fix.

When something is distressing to us, it’s very natural and understandable to want to get rid of it as fast as possible. While this seems like the obvious response to have, this stance can actually keep us caught in a negative feedback loop as we continue mounting resistance to what we’re feeling. Much of the research coming out today is actually pointing us in the other direction - the importance of learning how to more fully embrace what it is that’s arising in our lives. This fundamental acceptance is something that we have to practice but it can actually make large headway into our healing process.

This isn’t to say that we sit on our hands and do nothing about our pain - but rather that we can frame our healing journey with a context of gentleness and spaciousness. This equips us with the skills to become resilient toward what hurts now and in any future potentiality. While it’s important to establish clear therapeutic goals and to feel like the work we do together is effective and helping, it’s equally as important to let go of our expectations and to lean into the experience as it is without looking to manipulate it into something else.

(This piece is largely where mindfulness meditation comes into play, which will be discussed in a future blog post)

During The Session

Be Mindful of Guarding/ Don’t Assist!
One of the most common suggestions that I have for my clients during a session is that it’s preferable not to assist me when I’m maneuvering their bodies. My style includes a lot of stretching and movements that actually work best when the client remains passive and relaxed. There are certain techniques that require some active engagement but they’re always prompted in advance.

With this said, it can actually be quite tricky for some people to allow themselves to be totally relaxed in the massage space. Many of these assistances come from deeply unconscious places for a wide variety of reasons - many of which are safety related, which I won’t challenge or attempt to “correct”. In these cases, the best course of action is to simply be mindful when it’s taking place. The goal with this point is not to create a complex or paint this phenomenon as wrong, but to simply raise awareness that it’s happening.

Keeping this in mind, we can begin to use massage as a practice that teaches us how to completely relax into our bodies. Since the goal of massage is to bring us into a state of ease, we should be attentive to the moments when we’re the ones actively tensing. My guess is that the guarding and assisting that takes place on the table often has something to do with the tension and tightness that brought us to massage in the first place. With awareness, massage can be transformed from a passive service we receive into an active practice we engage with.

Communicate!
This rings doubly true for clients who are experiencing acute pain symptoms. Something I try to instill in each of my clients is that massage is best experienced when they’re in the driver’s seat. While falling asleep it’s totally okay and sometimes the most appropriate state to find oneself in, it could actually keep us from mapping out what’s happening in your body. While I’m not advocating for having conversations that aren’t related to the bodywork session, I do find it incredibly beneficial to offer up feedback on how the session is going. Are we touching on the places that hurt? Is there something that part of our body wants to have happen in order to heal? There’s a lot of information that can come from within our body’s intelligence that could provide huge benefits for the therapeutic process.

As we build a stronger therapeutic relationship, the level of communication does tend to decline in volume. This is because there’s some familiarity with the pain patterns that your body is expressing and we’re effectively mapping out what works and doesn’t work for you. At this point, the sessions do work best when you as a client allow yourself to sink into the deeper states of relaxation that are unique to massage therapy. This is where I think some of the most profound aspects of massage can come into play - which we’ll cover in the point below.

Pay Attention to Insights
It’s not hyperbolic to say that the experience of receiving a great massage can be considered an altered state. When the body is brought into the deeper domains of relaxation we can experience time distortions, hypnogogic states ( being half awake and half asleep), and even outright dreams or other psychic impressions. This occurs because our brains are shifting wavelengths from our regular waking state, which is the ‘beta state’, into what’s known as the ‘theta state’ which is typically accessed through light sleep, daydreaming, and deep meditation. Theta brainwaves are often associated with creativity, intuition, and access to the subconscious mind.

Having a more direct access to our intuition can be hugely beneficial not only for shifting our pain patterns but also for discovering other insights about our life at large. The way this information comes to the surface will be different for every person and situation - it may be an image, color, sound, or full on dream. The key here is to note what it is that’s arising in the mental stream and to treat it as important. These are pieces of information coming from a deeply embodied place and they have some semblance of meaning for your system - otherwise they wouldn’t have stuck in your subconscious!

Post-Massage

Take the Day Off If Possible!
Massage is a powerful practice, as we discussed above - the state it brings us to can be very deep. All too often people will cram a session into a busy day and lose out on the opportunity to let their nervous systems really bask in the experience. While I would rather someone get their session any way they can, even if it means they have to fit it in before work - I’m a huge advocate for creating some space after the session to be restful. This gives you a moment to allow the work to settle into the nervous system, essentially giving it more time it to impress itself upon the way it fires. When we shoot off to the next thing in a hurry it minimizes this process and can actually lose some of the potency of what we’re doing.

Since massage is primarily neurological in nature, namely in that we’re providing a torrent of unique sensations to the mechanoreceptors (the cells that detect manipulation in the tissues) - the change that we’re seeking requires time and continued exposure to really become accessible to us. This is in nature, a process of training the nervous system how to be more relaxed. The more time we allow ourselves to be in this restful post-massage state, the more likely it will log itself into the records of our nervous system.

Journal
As we discussed above in the point on insights, massage has the possibility of introducing us to the intelligence of our bodies. It can be a powerful practice to follow up a massage with a period of journaling to more fully explore what it is that we’ve experienced. This makes the information that we receive more graspable and at our disposal. It doesn’t even need to be regarding something profound as we can talk about our expectations during the session, any tensions we experienced, the ways in which we weren’t able to relax. Anything that comes up in the massage space can be used to understand ourselves more deeply.

The more you can elaborate on your experiences, the more comprehensive your internal map will become. By bridging the world of sensation with the thinking mind, you can create connections in your experience that can provide you with new resources and grounding.

Spend Time in Nature
Being in nature is exceptionally nourishing for our nervous systems. Far too many of us don’t give it the credit it deserves in it’s ability to bring us into a state of calm. Following up your massage session with some time spent in nature allows you a space to experience the newfound sense of ease in an environment that doesn’t pull too much on your attention. While massage emphasizes the sensation of touch, being out in nature can be therapeutic to your other senses as well! Breathing in the fresh air, seeing the landscape in it’s unique beauty, and hearing the sounds of birdsong or a running creek. All of these things can provide huge benefits for stabilizing us in an all too fast world.